Mind Sear: here we go again

Ghostcrawler's quote from the Mind Sear thread on the official forums.

We want Shadow to use multi-dotting in addition to Mind Sear when there are only a few targets. When Mind Sear is too strong, then the "rotation" becomes Mind Sear -> Mind Sear -> Mind Sear, which isn't a ton of fun. If you're AE'ing lots of targets, then it's fine to do nothing but Mind Sear (and perhaps a level 90 talent).

This won't work. This is basically the same idea that we had going into t11, and what ended up happening is that those specs who's AOE was designated (arbitrarily, imo) as "fun" were useful, and everyone else just had terrible AOE (like Shadow Priests, Retribution Paladins, etc). There were several fights where Shadow just wasn't able to do the job of AOEing in t11 thanks to a weak Mind Sear (Cho'gall, Maloriak, Magmaw, etc). And that was when our DOTs were actually OP. Now, with weak, expensive DOTs and weak Mind Sear combined with weak mana pools...yeah AOE is not going to be Shadow's strong suit in t14.

In his whole post he mentioned that they dont think MS>MS>MS is fun. I still maintain that one of the problems is that they are seemingly designing things under what THEY deem as fun. Not what the players actually playing (and paying.. yada yada) the priest deem as fun.

It's not even as simple as that. MS is buffed by evangelism and ES (for one more day atleast) so MS MS MS is just dumb if you want some competitive aoe.

I'm also going to add in something another person mentioned on the State of Shadow thread:

Ghostcrawler's quote from the Mind Sear thread on the official forums.

This won't work. This is basically the same idea that we had going into t11, and what ended up happening is that those specs who's AOE was designated (arbitrarily, imo) as "fun" were useful, and everyone else just had terrible AOE (like Shadow Priests, Retribution Paladins, etc). There were several fights where Shadow just wasn't able to do the job of AOEing in t11 thanks to a weak Mind Sear (Cho'gall, Maloriak, Magmaw, etc). And that was when our DOTs were actually OP. Now, with weak, expensive DOTs and weak Mind Sear combined with weak mana pools...yeah AOE is not going to be Shadow's strong suit in t14.

The new mana regen design that shadow gets makes our mana pretty much infinite as far as I can see. Multi-Dotting won't take you below 90-95% which is more than enough reason to believe that Blizzard wants Shadow Priests multi-dotting as much as possible.

I also wouldn't go as far to say our DoTs are weak...especially when Mind Flaying alone will get you 15k dps on a lvl 85 test dummy. All of our DoTs can essentially double crit...so of course their base damage goes down a bit, but at the end of the day they are still powerful.

idk what you are talking about when you say weak mana pools...all mana pools are fixed now, and to reiterate what I just said with the new mana regen system no shadow priest is going to dip under 90-95% mana (so mana is no issue at all) I would actually consider that broken right now.

It will be like at the time of T11.
Huge complaints until it is buffed again, and I hope it is.
Why consider MS if you are multidoting maybe in combination with SW:I, you won't have the time for MS I suppose.
And if MS isn't viable for 3-4 Targets, it won't be competetive at 10+ targets, but you won't have another choice, despite of maybe dot everything with SW: P and "execute" with SW:I, then renew SW: P.

It simply won't work (in comparison to other classes), as seen before the buff at the time of the T11 content.

I also wouldn't go as far to say our DoTs are weak...especially when Mind Flaying alone will get you 15k dps on a lvl 85 test dummy. All of our DoTs can essentially double crit...so of course their base damage goes down a bit, but at the end of the day they are still powerful.

Their stated goal is to make multidotting weaker than it is now. They've already nerfed our DOTs a few times since t11, so it follows logically that our AOE will be even worse in t14 (our DOTs are balanced/weak and Mind Sear hits like a wet noodle) than it was in t11 (when our DOTs were OP but Mind Sear hit like a wet noodle).

As to mana cost - if you multidot a lot you will run low on mana. Our DOTs are actually pretty expensive. You can really see this if you've ever tried to level by DOTing in Cata. We depend on the regen from AA and SF, and the occasional SW to make up for the cost of our DOTs in rotations, but that's only balanced for 2-3 targets. If you try to sustain DOTs on a lot of targets (think Rhyolith) you'll start running low, if not OOM. It isn't a big deal for bosses, just that on trash if you are pulling quickly you may find yourself mana strained. Or I do at least :P

2nd problem is that you cant use halo on Windlord Meljarak if u cc those adds...u really need to stay on the other side of the room for it and have no real movement then...not staying in the grp is also bad...

TBH it looks like when developers see shadow being close to top of the chart in their simulations they just nerf our damage by random 8-60%, just to make sure shadow is not ahead even by 1% dps. And by that post GC showed how weak he understands shadow's gameplay.

Gotta remember SWP is instant cast, has instant damage portion and has good DPET. Somewhat same style as balance sunfire spam as I mentioned earlier in some thread. So spamming swp + mind sear could be decent damage but this is to be seen if it works. Doubt using VT is worth with its cast time,though not using VT can lead to mana troubles.

If someone wants to do some numbers, make simcraft profile with only mind sear as spell to use, that should tell DPET value of mind sear against single target. From that its possible to compare that value against dpet of dots and make some conclusions if dot+MS spam is workable or not, and what are number of targets where its worth using.

TBH it looks like when developers see shadow being close to top of the chart in their simulations they just nerf our damage by random 8-60%, just to make sure shadow is not ahead even by 1% dps. And by that post GC showed how weak he understands shadow's gameplay.

They've done fine, we certainly had nothing to complain about in t11 and t12 (besides the aforementioned AOE issue in t11, but there were also several encounters that strongly favored our frankly overpowered multidotting as well). T13 balance issues were due to DTR and the obligatory melee/hunter over-buff (they couldn't get DTR, but t13's boss mechanics strongly favored melee anyways and some of the weapon procs from DW were broken). Honestly Cata was a golden age of shadow priesting...our spec had few issues, it had compelling gameplay and some of the strongest hybrid DPS in the game for many encounters.

Its clear in MoP they wanted to tone down Shadow Orb RNG (something a lot of players have asked for), and reduce our ramp-up time, which they have done (mostly by removing Empowered Shadows and Evangelism). They also wanted to tone down our multidotting, which thanks to overall DOT nerfs and removal of the ability to refresh SW:Ps they have done. I'm not on the beta so I can't comment on our DPS but I have a feeling some of the QQ about our DPS is due to a) the balance rollercoaster on beta and b) the fact we've been frankly overpowered for most of Cata and some folks have gotten used to that.

Gotta remember SWP is instant cast, has instant damage portion and has good DPET. Somewhat same style as balance sunfire spam as I mentioned earlier in some thread. So spamming swp + mind sear could be decent damage but this is to be seen if it works. Doubt using VT is worth with its cast time,though not using VT can lead to mana troubles.

The rampup time is too long. AOE is often about burst damage - many specs have low AOE because what they actually have is low ramp up and by the time their AOE is out the mobs are already dead from things like Bladestorm and multishot.

About AoE.. indeed it's probably same thing that happened in WOTLK and Cata. It will be buffed sooner or later. Our lvl 90 talents are close to useless in pve because of the long cd and special position requirements. Cascade is just rediculous: targets should be in 30 yards from each other and the first target should be in 30 yards from the priest.

GC argument that MS-MS-MS is not fun - this is not even an argument, it's an opinion. He wants us to multidot and then spam MS. This is just silly because it only works on high hp targets, targets that SWP/VT can roll on for full duration. What if target need to be killed fast? What if there are too many targets to mutlidot?

And btw Mind Sear is not affected by evangelism, but it's affected by ES.

"Honestly Cata was a golden age of shadow priesting" - this is true. Cataclysm shadow is a very flexible spec that can adapt to almost any type of fights.
And yes there were few issues like big ramp up time and too much multi-dot damage, but instead of fixing it they reworked the whole mechanic.
What do we have in MoP:
1) Ramp-up time - even higher because you need 3 orbs for DP. It takes ~21seconds to setup so in pve you have all your procs wasted before you can even cast a 3orb DP.
2) Multidot damage - the overall multidot dps on beta seems fine, but the main source of this damage comes frfom FDCL/DI or even SW:I if used perfectly. I'm not complaining about this but as I see on the forum, most shadow priests would prefer dots to do the damage, not some procs. There are different ways to fix this issue w/o nerfing dot damage.

Our damage-on-the-move is also "reworked". On live we can spam instant DP as long as we have to. It's just a slight dps loss compared to our normal rotation. In MoP we take FDCL and maybe DI or MS glyph that reduces MB cast time by 50% with each stack. So our damage-on-the-move is based on procs. Yes, you save 2 FDCL procs to use them while moving, but saving FDCL procs can lead to DPS loss because they can be capped easily. And the instant damage of SWP is around 1/4 of live version DP instant damage so it's not an option either. Dot damage nerfed - it doesn't help with movement dps aswell.

I don't like when they deem what is 'fun'. You know whats not fun? Doing shitty DPS and feeling like a dink because you aren't helping your guild as much as another class could.

I don't like other players telling me what is fun. You know whats not fun? Discussion about how fun it is to do dps on a new system that only 1 to 25 percent of the participants of said discussion experienced in a viable enviroment yet.

1) Ramp-up time - even higher because you need 3 orbs for DP. It takes ~21seconds to setup so in pve you have all your procs wasted before you can even cast a 3orb DP.

Its not the same - in Cata before 4pc t13 you could either get ES up almost right away (and thus, your initial set of DOTs were buffed with it) or go upwards of a minute without an orb proc which means 1-2 sets of DOTs were unbuffed. DP is big but I don't think its going to be as big as a full set of unbuffed DOTs.

It's funny how they nerf mind sear because repeatedly casting mind sear isn't "fun", when that's only the case because they removed the interaction between shadow orbs and mind sear. I loved how you had to pre-plan your aoe in t13 by dropping swp's into the crowd before they stacked to ensure continued orb generation during your searing, while keeping es and dots up on the primary target. Considering that these interactions are entirely removed in mop, I'm hoping for an entire rework of mind sear tbh. Their intent seems to be to make it a filler spell when faced with aoe, however that just means our burst aoe is going to be atrocious. Rather than that, I would like to see something along the lines of mind sear being a very powerful aoe cast, but with a shadow orb cost. Instead of having mind sear be an aoe mind flay equivalent, make it a devouring plague aoe equivalent. I would take a strong, planned aoe burst over a filler aoe any day. I believe this solution would defeat their perceived "fun" deficiency, since you would only be able to mind sear once per mb cd (assuming ms has a single orb cost), giving you time to reapply dots between mb's. Pipe dream most likely, but there's always hope.

That said, mind sear was too powerful prior to the 59% damage nerf patch, however returning us to t11 levels isn't the answer. Any time that mind sear is a dps boost over keeping dots up on 3 targets, there's a problem. Mind sear certainly needs to take a backseat to dots when targets will live long enough to see a full dot duration, however I don't think Blizzard took into account that not every aoe situation has adds that will live a good 15 seconds. The nerf was definitely too extreme and I have no doubt in my mind that it will be buffed, I just hope it happens prior to Will of the Emperor heroic. Be prepared to link your sorryYor'Sahj and Madness logs tonight so that we can hopefully get the ball rolling on a buff.